Description

Exploit is a strategic pseudohacking game about a US hacker. One day, he receives a message from his friend sk3tch who tells him about the island Locha, a dictatorship in the middle of the ocean that filters internet access through a firewall, a government-mandated censor designed to curtail any political dissent. Sk3tch urges the hacker to use his skills for good and compromise it to bring some freedom to the country.

The game's story mode is divided in three chapters where the player need to hack a certain system, such as airport security, cell phones, firewalls, and more, to progress. Each chapter has a map where locations and descriptions are shown, and the story is furthered through e-mail messages and general reports after each successful hack. What starts as an innocent experiment, quickly grows out of proportions as many systems become compromised, even leading to terrorist threats on US soil.

The grid where the hack is performed consists of a variable number of squares. To successfully complete it, a packet fired by an orange node needs to hit a green root note to crack the security. Easy at first, the complexity quickly increases when different kinds of barriers and multiple nodes are introduced. For instance: yellow buffer nodes can be hit to cause a packet overflow at blocker nodes, clearing the way for packets temporarily. There are also purple nodes that divide packets in opposing directions, blue directory nodes that reveal the paths that connect nodes, cyan latch nodes that can be crashed with a packet hit but quickly recover, and port knock keys that reveal new orange nodes when hit.

To complete a pattern, a successful series of packets need to be launched, triggering the right nodes at the correct moment. It requires a lot of trial and error, and players need to analyse the connected notes first to establish a plan of attack. Timing is also of the essence, and in later levels the time span to have packets pass becomes smaller.

For each chapter, players can call upon a DDOS attack one time to immediately solve and skip a puzzle. There is also a challenge mode with fifteen custom puzzles, and an editor with the ability to share levels with other users through a codestring. A short tutorial familiarizes the player with the different aspects and strategies.